A Reading Man's Guide to Dirty Books

E. L. James, the British author of the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey and its litter of sequels, has sold some 54 million books worldwide. Her smashing success has only strengthened the sociologically murky idea that getting turned on by words rather than images is somehow unmanly. Visual pornography certainly has its place, and that place is my computer screen at 10 p.m. on a Friday night whenever my girlfriend is out of town. However, we as men surrender some valuable terrain if we accept that the production and consumption of sexy books is simply not for us. The best way to seduce an intelligent woman? It's shockingly simple, really. Read to her.

There are plenty of genuinely hot books written by women—Lisa Zeidner's Layover, Josephine Hart's Damage, Marguerite Duras's The Lover—but Fifty Shades of Grey is not one of them. As a work of art, the only way it could be worse is if it ended with "Heil Hitler." The novel's narrator is Anastasia Steele, a charmless dolt who doesn't like to dance, wear nice clothes, have sex, or say interesting things. During one of her early meetings with Christian Grey, the Pacific Northwest's richest and most eligible bachelor, she pukes. Yet Grey is taken with her. "You're a mystery, Miss Steele," he tells her early in the book. Sixty pages later: "I am in awe of you." She's not, and he shouldn't be.

Reading James's book on a recent flight from Los Angeles to Detroit, I turned to Sue, the extremely nice mom-of-four with whom I shared row 23. She had, of course, read all the Grey books. "Come on," I said. "What on earth would Christian Grey ever see in Anastasia Steele? It's ridiculous!"

Sue, I could tell, was hurt by this question. She fumbled around in her mind's attic for a moment before saying, "She's the only one who doesn't want his money."

"She loves his money! She's constantly impressed with all the helicopter rides!"

"That," I said, "is the least erotic sentence in the history of language."

"I think it's sweet," Sue said.

Passage two: " ‘Aargh!' I cry as I feel a weird pinching sensation deep inside me as he rips through my virginity."

"Sue, listen to me. ‘Aargh' does not belong in any novel, much less an erotic one."

"But the whole novel is about pain and pleasure."

I decided to confront Sue with anthropological directness. "So. Sue. You found this novel sexy. You were turned on by it."

Sue looked away. "Oh, yes."

Sue's husband, who I should point out was listening to all this, began to nod. "She really did," he said. Had Sue's husband read it? "After my master's degree," he said, "I decided to stop reading books."

Fair enough. It was then that I realized why women across the Western world were firing up their vibrators at the thought of Christian Grey flogging the imbecilic Anastasia Steele. The story was the wand by which E. L. James had transformed the realm's every mom-jeaned frump into a preciously violated princess. You could argue that we see the male equivalent of this dynamic all the time in sitcoms wherein the pudgy dork cohabits with the curiously hot young wife. The crucial difference is we don't masturbate to sitcoms. Not ideally, anyway.

There is, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with reading an occasional trashy book before having a wank and turning in. But if you're looking to master the fine art of Erotic Cooperative Reading, trashy books aren't going to do it—unless bursting into embarrassed laughter counts as foreplay. Prose doesn't need to suffer in the conjuration of body heat. Here are five novels that prove it.

No. 1

John Updike *

Couples (1968)

When I was in the sixth grade, I got my hands on a hardcover copy of John Updike's Couples. A few adults in my orbit—teachers, parents, friends of parents—took note. For them, "John Updike" wasn't a name so much as a signifier of literary urbanity. So I'd sit there before class, in Catholic school, reading Couples, which is filled with scenes involving "fumbly dripping genitals," astonished that my teacher wasn't rushing over to pull the book from my hands and douse me with a fire extinguisher. No one, I realized with a thrill,has any idea what's actually in this thing.

Soon after I finished Couples, I read another Updike novel, Rabbit Is Rich (1981):"To stick your tongue in just as far as it would go while her pussy tickles your nose. No acne in that crotch. Heaven." Hang on. Crotches can have acne? Good to know! If I ever have children of my own, I'll be planting the dirtiest Updike novels I can find in all my home's high-traffic areas. The best way to encourage reading, especially in these digital times, is to remind young people how sexually diabolical good writing can be.

No. 2

Nicholson Baker

The Fermata (1994)

Nicholson Baker's The Fermata is probably the most good-natured sexy novel of our time, despite its having one of the most potentially sinister and disturbing setups imaginable. Its narrator, Arno Strine, has been blessed with the ability to freeze time, producing what he calls "the Fold," through which he alone is free to move and loiter. (A fermata is, technically speaking, a pause in a piece of music.) In another writer's hands, this planet-stilling conceit might make for some nifty hunk of Inception-like sci-fi, but Baker uses it to explore the inner terrain of imagination, male desire, and loneliness, for what Arno likes to do while in the Fold is take women's clothes off, touch them a little, and masturbate.

It helps that Baker is among our greatest living prose stylists, able to describe a time-frozen woman's breast as a "hot heavy ostrich egg" and the female anus as "discrete, singular, clearly bounded, focused, in contrast to the bounteous plied gyno-confusion of the vadge." Baker is particularly good on ejaculation, coming up with so many ways to describe the grand event ("I released one-liners of sperm up her forearm"; "I would send forth four gray stripes of fatherhood") that he might well be the Picasso of come. The best passage in the book describes the difference between male and female urine discharge, the latter falling from between a woman's legs "confusedly, in a stegosaurian fan." There is more loving, observant detail in this passage than E. L. James has managed in 1,600 pages.

No. 3

Alan Hollinghurst *

The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library was once described by none other than Nicholson Baker as containing an "initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex"; yet Baker also ranked it high among the finest first novels he'd ever read. As a non-gay man, I don't find the level of homosexual sex contained in the book disgusting. If anything, I find it conceptually overwhelming. The Swimming-Pool Library is like a gelateria of erotic variability: interracial, intergenerational, rough, soft, quickies, hardies, scaries, get-the-fuck-off-me's—The Swimming-Pool Library goes everywhere, sexually speaking, provided no women dwell there.

Hollinghurst's story is primarily concerned with two men: William, who is pretty and young and brilliant, and Charles, who is old and rich and desperate. William and Charles need each other emotionally and intellectually but not sexually. They meet while seeking out anonymous sex at a public restroom in London, during which Charles has heart trouble and William saves him. Hollinghurst is a tender and lyrically fussy writer, which means his sex scenes can be astonishingly sad and mournful. When one of William's lovers gets undressed, Hollinghurst takes the time to notice "the red blotch of an insect bite in the tender, creased skin at his waistband."

It's been said that repressing homosexuals created Proust, whereas liberating them created Cabaret. Maybe so, but it also created The Swimming-Pool Library, an immensely sexy gay novel every straight man owes it to himself to read.

No. 4

Nic Kelman*

girls (2003)

Nic Kelman's girls feels like a drug-fueled sex party's bleak days-long hangover. Yes, Fifty Shades of Grey plays around with bondage themes, but girls explores the far more insidious bondage of being a man with a brain—and by "brain" I mean the primitive Neanderthal brain that hastened our escape from the savanna by telling our loping ancestors to fuck whatever they felt like fucking. Reading girls is like wandering around a strange city at night with money in your pocket, loose women on your mind, and great black wings flapping in your chest.

There aren't really any sustained characters in girls; it's told mostly in a second-person "you" that floats between various rich older men involved with various young—sometimes alarmingly so—women. The women, moreover, tend to be sex workers, as in the book's opening vignette, which involves a businessman in Korea deciding to summon to his room a prostitute who turns out to be younger than he anticipated. As the man begins to touch the girl, he notices "how clumsy" his fingers are, "how enormous, how ugly. Like a gorilla's."

This is not a misogynistic book, though its characters are often misogynists. Nevertheless, girls mis up vividly detailed sex scenes with episodes of sociosexual horror so successfully that I imagine many women could read it only by turning the pages with tongs. The distinct type of misogyny Kelman's most interested in cataloging is, at any rate, less a hatred of women than a hatred of human existence itself.

Kelman doesn't shrink from the more nightmarish aspects of sex. One older man swings a teenage girl around so that her "little breasts" meet his "hungry mouth," and as he stuffs his fingers into her, he notes that she "couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and five pounds"—a line that made me nearly physically ill. But if I'm honest, I must also admit the line triggered an awful kind of animal arousal, too. Kelman's prose cracks right through the soft shale of what we think sex writing should properly address and shows us the petroleum darkness agush at fathoms the civilized mind no longer cares to explore.

5.

James Salter *

A Sport and a Pastime (1967)

It's somewhat shocking to realize that James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime was published within a decade of the final relaxation of American censorship. The book's sex scenes are so raw, sad, and beautiful that its prose seems to exist outside aesthetic time. These pages could have been written yesterday or pulled from a steamer trunk sealed tight for a hundred years at the bottom of the ocean.

Salter's nameless narrator, a man wandering around provincial France sometime in the early 1960s, meets another young American, named Phillip Dean. After a few brief, ghostly scenes involving the two, Dean wanders off to take up with Anne-Marie, a poor and somewhat plain 18-year-old French girl. Soon enough, Salter's narrator is watching the young lovers court, fall in love, undress, have sex, and drift apart. Much of what the narrator tells involves experiences he has no direct access to. As a result, the book feels like an innovatively triangulated hybrid of memoir, novel, and dream.

Salter's prose is the functional equivalent of sex, thrumming and disassociated and suddenly hard and breathless when it chooses to pounce and linger: "The trains are running on time. Along the empty streets, yellow headlights of a car occasionally pass.... With a touch like flowers, she is gently tracing the base of his cock, driven by now all the way into her, touching his balls, and beginning to writhe slowly beneath him in a sort of obedient rebellion."

The great mistake most writers make in writing about sex is approaching it as though it merits special attention. It doesn't. It simply merits the same attention one would give weather, a face, a tree. Describing the sexual act requires no specialist vocabulary, no raising or lowering of diction, and absolutely no euphemism, which is a tool of the craven. In that sense, A Sport and a Pastime could be the aspiring writer's how-to guide. Its sex scenes, most of which are brief, are so rich with conflicted emotion and churning ambivalence that no one who's ever been young and in love will be able to read it without wincing, as when Dean notes Anne-Marie's bad breath or her homely "shopgirl's" face moments after making love to her. Isn't at least half of what makes sex sex what we're thinking while having it? Not all those thoughts are kind. Some, in fact, are privately cruel. Intimacy with another human being is nothing if not being constantly aware of how easily you could hurt them.

I'm not sure that fans of Fifty Shades of Grey even want to read about sex. With all due respect to Sue (and Sue's husband), I think the book's success is more about its modernization of the Harlequin-romance formula—a kind of de-vampirized, harder-edged Twilight. It's not about sex so much as it is about tunneling into the densely protected heart of a Dark Unavailable Man. Or maybe the Grey books' zillions of readers just want to be abused, and the flog that comes down on their backs is one of nerve-deadening prose.

A hot literary sex scene is, above all else, truthful about sex as it's felt and experienced by actual human beings. A bad literary sex scene is cynical—a commercial for impossible sensations. Writers who write about sex effectively unprivatize privacy; they remind a reader that he or she is not alone in kink or quirk. To write about sex well, you have to be brave. To read about sex well, though, you have to be honest. You have to be willing to be turned on, and you have to be willing to be disgusted; you also have to understand the difference between being turned on and being disgusted. That's the nutshell history of censorship: turned-on people claiming to be disgusted.

Reading about sex takes two of our most private selves—the sexual self and the reading self and makes a two-backed beast of them. It allows you to wander into a library and discover an orgy. It makes you smarter and more attentive and might even make you a better lover. Once again, gentlemen: Read to the lady, why don't you.

A Reading Man's Guide to Dirty Books

Chicks may like to read about sex. But guys? You won't catch us hunkering down under the bedsheets with soft-core sensation of the year Fifty Shades of Grey. We require, you know, pictures. Right? Tom Bissell, a connoisseur of the finest literary smut since before the age of consent, is here to tell you otherwise

E. L. James, the British author of the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey and its litter of sequels, has sold some 54 million books worldwide. Her smashing success has only strengthened the sociologically murky idea that getting turned on by words rather than images is somehow unmanly. Visual pornography certainly has its place, and that place is my computer screen at 10 p.m. on a Friday night whenever my girlfriend is out of town. However, we as men surrender some valuable terrain if we accept that the production and consumption of sexy books is simply not for us. The best way to seduce an intelligent woman? It's shockingly simple, really. Read to her.

There are plenty of genuinely hot books written by women—Lisa Zeidner's Layover, Josephine Hart's Damage, Marguerite Duras's The Lover—but Fifty Shades of Grey is not one of them. As a work of art, the only way it could be worse is if it ended with "Heil Hitler." The novel's narrator is Anastasia Steele, a charmless dolt who doesn't like to dance, wear nice clothes, have sex, or say interesting things. During one of her early meetings with Christian Grey, the Pacific Northwest's richest and most eligible bachelor, she pukes. Yet Grey is taken with her. "You're a mystery, Miss Steele," he tells her early in the book. Sixty pages later: "I am in awe of you." She's not, and he shouldn't be.

Reading James's book on a recent flight from Los Angeles to Detroit, I turned to Sue, the extremely nice mom-of-four with whom I shared row 23. She had, of course, read all the Grey books. "Come on," I said. "What on earth would Christian Grey ever see in Anastasia Steele? It's ridiculous!"

Sue, I could tell, was hurt by this question. She fumbled around in her mind's attic for a moment before saying, "She's the only one who doesn't want his money."

"She loves his money! She's constantly impressed with all the helicopter rides!"

"That," I said, "is the least erotic sentence in the history of language."

"I think it's sweet," Sue said.

Passage two: " ‘Aargh!' I cry as I feel a weird pinching sensation deep inside me as he rips through my virginity."

"Sue, listen to me. ‘Aargh' does not belong in any novel, much less an erotic one."

"But the whole novel is about pain and pleasure."

I decided to confront Sue with anthropological directness. "So. Sue. You found this novel sexy. You were turned on by it."

Sue looked away. "Oh, yes."

Sue's husband, who I should point out was listening to all this, began to nod. "She really did," he said. Had Sue's husband read it? "After my master's degree," he said, "I decided to stop reading books."

Fair enough. It was then that I realized why women across the Western world were firing up their vibrators at the thought of Christian Grey flogging the imbecilic Anastasia Steele. The story was the wand by which E. L. James had transformed the realm's every mom-jeaned frump into a preciously violated princess. You could argue that we see the male equivalent of this dynamic all the time in sitcoms wherein the pudgy dork cohabits with the curiously hot young wife. The crucial difference is we don't masturbate to sitcoms. Not ideally, anyway.

There is, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with reading an occasional trashy book before having a wank and turning in. But if you're looking to master the fine art of Erotic Cooperative Reading, trashy books aren't going to do it—unless bursting into embarrassed laughter counts as foreplay. Prose doesn't need to suffer in the conjuration of body heat. Here are five novels that prove it.